ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. We hear a lot from our readers and listeners about how time constrained they are. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.

But some new research suggests that it’s possible to change that feeling paradoxically by spending some of our precious time helping other people. I’m here today with Cassie Mogilner of the Wharton School who conducted that research along with Zoe Chance of Yale and Michael Norton of Harvard. Cassie, thanks so much for joining us today.

CASSIE MOGILNER: Thanks for having me.

ALISON BEARD: So why don’t you start out by telling me how you got interested in time?

CASSIE MOGILNER: Well, broadly, I’m actually interested in happiness and well-being and figuring out what are ways that people can conduct themselves so as to live the best, most fulfilling life? And what I noticed was that in a lot of the research that’s focusing on well-being, there’s been an incredible focus on money. But I found that in my own life for sure, as well as my observations, that time seems to be the resource that is more critical, I would say, to individuals’ well-being and their happiness over the course of their day. Because of that I’m interested in, how should people spend their time? To what extent should they focus on time to play out in the best way possible?

ALISON BEARD: And I know that your colleague Zoe had done some research on giving away money. Is that where the idea of research on giving away time came up?

CASSIE MOGILNER: Yeah. So in Zoe’s dissertation work, which she did with Mike Norton, our other co-author, they had observed an interesting effect whereby when people spend, or basically donate money or give money away, they feel themselves to be richer despite the fact that they have given some of their money away, and therefore they are less wealthy from an objective standpoint. And then again, as I mentioned, with my focus on time, I was curious as to whether this effect would play out from a temporal perspective. So extending their research from a question of does giving money away make you feel richer? It’s could giving time away make you feel as though you have more time? And that’s what we explored.

ALISON BEARD: So tell me specifically about the study that you conducted.

CASSIE MOGILNER: So we ran several studies. What we did was we were basically comparing participants who we had give their time away– generally spending their time to help others, so they would, for instance, in one study, we have them spend five minutes writing a encouraging note to a sick child, which we then sent to those children. In another study, we had them spend 15 minutes helping an at-risk high school student at a school essay. And in another study, we basically just told people, go spend 10 or 30 minutes helping someone else.

And we compared these to other instances of spending time, but not on others. For instance, wasting time by circling E’s in Latin text, for instance; gaining a windfall of free time, as in they could leave that lab 15 minutes early; or spending time on themselves. So on a Saturday morning, while we told some participants to spend either 10 or 30 minutes helping someone else, we told another group of participants spend 10 to 30 minutes today doing something for yourself.

So we compared these instances of giving time to either spending time with oneself, wasting it, or getting a windfall of free time. And then we measured their perceptions of how much time they have on various self-report measures. And those who had spent the time helping someone else actually reported to feel that they had more time than those who spent it on themselves or spent it in a wasteful way.

ALISON BEARD: Right. And that seems so strange, because obviously if they were giving time to someone else, they technically had less time. So why do you think that you saw this positive effect?

CASSIE MOGILNER: It is counter-intuitive. They objectively have less time because they gave some of it away. The reason that the results suggest that we got this effect is because spending time on others makes one feel more effective, more capable and competent. And basically, when more happens in a particular period of time, then that period of time is perceived to be longer. And so this feeling of having spent time in a very effective way makes you feel like you’ve accomplished a lot and therefore that you can accomplish a lot in your time to come, in your future time.

And it also plays out in objective behavior, though. So in one study, for instance, we not only measured how much time they thought that they had, but we also gave them an opportunity to commit their future time– basically sign up to complete surveys that they would get paid for in the future. And they could choose how much time that they would like to spend on these surveys. And what we found was that those who spent time helping a high school student at their school essay, they ended up signing up for more surveys in the future, basically committing to do more in the future than those who were allowed to leave 15 minutes early, so those who objectively actually did have more time.

And then we followed up a week later to see not only what they commit to doing more in the future, but what they actually do more. And we found that they did. So those who spent their time in a altruistic way helping someone ended up doing more with their future time, basically completing more surveys than those who got a windfall of time or those who had more time.

ALISON BEARD: It was almost as if they realized the positive effects of being charitable, and so decided to start doing more of it.

CASSIE MOGILNER: Yes. But I would actually point out that there has been other previous research that suggests that people who volunteer, then there’s this– they volunteer more in the future. But conducting the surveys was somewhat different in that it wasn’t an altruistic behavior. They were getting paid for it. So basically, it suggests that they’re more productive. Once you’ve done something that makes you feel effective, namely, giving your time away, then it makes you more productive.

ALISON BEARD: And wouldn’t the people feel just as productive if they had buckled down and done their work rather than giving time away to help someone else?

CASSIE MOGILNER: Yeah, possibly. Anything that makes you feel effective, but as we all know, over the course of our days, we do need breaks. We need to take time off. And now the question is, how do you spend those breaks? One could relax, watch TV, or do something that is for oneself, surfing the internet or whatever it is. Or one could take that 15 minute break to go help out a colleague or do something nice for their spouse.

And what this research suggests that counter to people’s inclination to relax and take it easy during those breaks, if they instead spent it on other people, then they would actually perhaps be more rejuvenated from the breaks and ultimately be more productive.

ALISON BEARD: Does duration matter? You keep mentioning in between breaks, 15 minutes. Is there more effect if you spend a longer amount of time helping someone else?

CASSIE MOGILNER: So in our studies, we looked at spending five minutes. We looked at spending 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 15 minutes. And we found that there was not a difference for the 10 or 30 minutes, for instance. That was in one study on a Saturday morning. We told some people to spend 10 minutes helping someone else, some people to spend 30 minutes helping someone else versus other people who were told spend 10 or 30 minutes doing something for yourself.

And we found that irrespective of whether they spent 10 or 30 minutes on someone else, they felt like they had more time than if they had spent those 10 or 30 minutes on themselves, suggesting that it’s really not the amount of time that you spend, it’s really how you spend that time. Now granted, there is probably an upper limit of this effect. For instance, we didn’t look at spending a week helping someone else versus getting your work done over the course of that week. So presumably, there is an upper limit and you can think about it again with respect to the underlying mechanism, this role of self-efficacy. If you start giving so much of your time away that you feel less effective and less able to accomplish the things that you need to do, then you’re not going to see these positive results.

ALISON BEARD: And what constitutes helping others? Does it have to be a very charitable effort, or can it be something small?

CASSIE MOGILNER: It can be something small. We actually found that it didn’t matter whether you were doing it for a unknown another– in a charitable setting or a donation or volunteer setting– or whether you were giving it to someone you knew. So for instance, going back to our study on the Saturday where we told people they could actually spend the time any way they wanted but we told them to spend it on someone else, you saw that there was a range of behaviors.

Some people spent those 30 minutes doing something really nice for their spouse– cooking her husband his favorite meal or writing their grandma a thinking of you note– whereas others went to the park and picked up litter for their neighbors. Another went and helped a stranger wipe the snow off their porch. That’s all to say that it doesn’t matter how you’re spending the time for another, as long as you feel like it is for another. And therefore, you get that benefit of feeling effective and like you’ve helped someone.

ALISON BEARD: Are there any other techniques we can use to make ourselves less time-constrained or feel less time-constrained?

CASSIE MOGILNER: Yeah. So not our research, but there are other researchers who have been exploring the question of how we can make ourselves feel less time-constrained. And some of the research suggests that something as easy as breathing deeply and being mindful, meditative type thing, can make you feel as if time is expanding compared to taking short, quick breaths and focusing on the future and all that you know that you have to do. So there is meditation, and then our work, of course, suggests that the way that you spend time can also influence your perceptions of how much time you have.

ALISON BEARD: Great. Cassie, thanks again for joining us today.

CASSIE MOGILNER: Thank you so much.

ALISON BEARD: That was Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Her research on time can be found in the Defend Your research section of the September Harvard Business Review or online at hbr.org.